In general, the present invention relates to ligation methods, in particular, for joining peptide acceptors to nucleic acids.
Methods currently exist for the preparation of RNA-protein fusions. An RNA-protein fusion is created by attaching a peptide acceptor to the 3′ end of an RNA molecule, followed by in vitro or in situ translation of the RNA. The product is a peptide attached to the 3′ end of the RNA encoding it. The generation of these RNA-protein fusions facilitates the isolation of proteins with desired properties from large pools of partially or completely random amino acid sequences, and solves the problem of recovering and amplifying protein sequence information by covalently attaching the RNA coding sequence to its corresponding protein molecule.